


The Way We Were

by justine472



Series: Happy Days [1]
Category: Holby City
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Education, F/F, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 03:32:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19054384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justine472/pseuds/justine472
Summary: Prequel to the main Berena story in "i dream of love as time runs through my hands". Language teaching AU. Bernie had a one night stand with Serena 25 years before, something she can’t forget. This is the story of how she met Jac Naylor - who features as a friend in the main fic- and Alex Dawson. Serena is not a main character but there are flashbacks. This is part of Bernie’s journey to understanding her sexuality and the road back to Serena.





	1. Porto, Portugal, early October, 2012

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is being re-posted after some minor tinkering. It does not have to be read as the first in the series- some readers may prefer to read the second fic first and come back to this one for more context.
> 
> The EU project mentioned in this story is entirely fictional, although drawn from the author's previous experience of work in education, and no characters in the story represent any real life characters.

  _Jac Naylor_

 The day I met Bernie Wolfe is stamped on my memory for some reason. I was with my colleagues from the Anglo-Portuguese Language Institute (APLI) having lunch on a boat anchored in the River Douro. It was a Sunday, one of those hot autumn days where the sun dangles lazily behind the trees and suddenly zaps you with its power when you get the wrong angle. I was fiddling with my sunglasses and trying to see the facial features of the new person suddenly emerging from the glare and heading towards us.  All I could see was tall, slim and blonde, in a simple sleeveless dress, colours shimmering in the refracted sunlight. The words of the Al Stewart song “Year of the Cat” came into my head as I squinted in her direction.

  _She came out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolour in the rain._

My heart sank, because it was obvious that every male gaze in the place was fixed on her. I could hear their breath catch and feel their excitement as Mitch, the sucker, stumbled to his feet and pulled out a chair next to him and directly opposite me. I pulled down my sunglasses to see her face, wondering whether it was worth saying hello, or whether the guys either side would leap in first. As the sun dipped and I caught a clear glimpse, I could see she was every bit as beautiful as I had assumed. Shoulder length blonde hair, a little messy, fair, unblemished skin with a golden glow from the sun, expressive brown eyes and a pleasing arrangement of facial features. She took her seat between the panting guys and, ignoring them completely, stuck her hand out and said “Bernie Wolfe, hi”.  I responded with the same “Jac Naylor”. She gave me a conspiratorial grin, which I thought a bit presumptuous, before introducing herself to the guys at our table.

I wondered what she was doing among us plebs with her aristocratic airs and graces; I put her at around ten years older than myself- I later found out it was 12 years, which would make her 47, but she carried the years lightly. My biggest fear was that she would be my new boss. Our current Director was being treated in the UK for bowel cancer, and it was uncertain whether or not he would return. The last thing I wanted was a female boss who had all the guys drooling over her, and who could block my ambitions. The current situation was perfect- while Duncan was out of the picture, myself and the other Assistant Director of Studies, Jamie, were Acting Directors of Study. I was the head of academic programmes and Jamie handled the management and corporate side of things. Bernie must have sensed my anxiety because she was quick to explain her presence.

 “Thanks for letting me join you today. Jamie invited me to come along- we met yesterday at a meeting to discuss APLI’s successful bid for part of the new EU project. I’ve been appointed Teacher Training lead on that project, and since APLI will be one of the project partners, we’ll be working together.”

 This was news to me. I raised my eyebrows and looked over at Jamie, who had just returned to the table clutching several cold bottles of Vinho Verde that he distributed among us.

 “Sorry, Jac, didn’t get the chance to tell you yesterday that Bernie would be on our team. She’s the EU’s appointee.”

 His partner, João, began uncorking the wine and pouring it. Bernie smiled at him and lifted the cold, fragrant wine, tipping it slightly in my direction.

 “Well, cheers, Jac! Here’s to a fruitful cooperation!”

 I wasn’t so sure of that myself, but I gave her a small smile and lifted my glass too. As we drank, the sun’s rays found the wedding band on her left hand, which was resting on the table, and directed the glint right into my eyes.

 **

Bernie showed up at the Institute the following day, her skimpy sun dress now exchanged for black skinny jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt.  Jamie ushered her into the meeting room where I had already been told to wait, notebook at the ready. Next to her understated elegance, I felt dowdy in my navy chinos and pink scoop -neck top. I started in aggressively, determined to set the pace of the meeting and show her that I was on top of my task.

 “So what’s the score, then? I’ve read the project description and we’ll be working mostly from here. You’ll be based in the university, so how will we manage cooperation?”

 Bernie was calm and confident.

 “I’m the Teacher Training lead on this project, and I’ll be working both with APLI and the English department at the Uni. Between you and me, I can already see that APLI will be the more effective partner. The university lot are disorganised and there’s a lot of power politics going on. I need a right-hand person in charge of curriculum planning to sit with me in the meetings with them and help keep the balance so that we can get through this without being pulled into their mess. Jamie tells me you’re the best.”

 “Well it may have escaped your notice, but I already have a full time job here.”

 “I’m well aware, but Jamie- and Duncan, who we’ve been speaking to in the UK, feel that you will be indispensable to this project, so they’ve arranged for 50% of your work to be covered so you can be released to work with me. And I suggest we base ourselves here so you don’t have to do all the running around. “

I glared at her for a moment, feeling as if the ground had been cut from beneath my feet. Jamie, no doubt afraid I would rock whatever boat he thought he was steering, interjected hurriedly.

“It means a huge salary hike, Jac. APLI gets a proportion of the project funds but if we second a staff member to the EU team, that person will get an EU salary. Or, in this case, 50% of an EU salary, which is double your current full time salary.”

 I raised my eyebrows. While the extra money was good news to me, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

 “And you didn’t think it worth running this past me beforehand?”

 “I’m running this past you now”, said Bernie firmly. “I’ve only just got on top of all the specs myself and I had to negotiate a possible way forward with APLI before I could make an offer. I can give you until 6 pm this evening to decide, if that’s what you need. “

 I pretended to consider for a moment.

 “No, I don’t need decision time. I can do it, not for the money, you understand, but because I could use it on my CV.”

 Bernie gave a small, suppressed smile which infuriated me as she made it look as though she knew something I didn’t.

 “Speaking of which, all the recommendations I’ve had about you have been verbal. I’m going to need your full CV and copies of your Bachelors, Diploma and Masters certificates, OK?”

 “Sure. You’ll have them by tomorrow morning.”

 “Fine. And Jamie has given us your shared office to work in. He’ll move to Duncan’s office temporarily”.

 Yeah, I bet he will, I thought.

 

_Bernie Wolfe_

 I’d been warned about Jac Naylor before I approached her. Jamie and I were on the same MA course many years back, and I was relieved to find a friendly face. The university crowd were extremely difficult to deal with. There was a passive-aggressive thing going on there, largely because the EU had been stupid enough to put all those seconded to the project team on ludicrously high salaries, while the others got only hourly pay for the time they worked on the project. In a relatively low income country like Portugal, that was asking for trouble, and trouble they certainly got. The Portuguese teachers protested the loudest because most of the secondments went to the expats in the Department. The given reason was their previous experience, but the locals didn’t see it like that. They called it discrimination, and made several appeals to the Head of Faculty and the Rector of the university to have things placed on a more even footing. At the same time they had to be nice to me, because the project success depended on them being able to work with me. So while Jac Naylor also threatened to be prickly, at least she was direct. What you saw was what you got. She was also attractive, shoulder length red hair, petite figure, sculpted cheekbones and cool grey-green eyes. If she hadn’t tried so hard to be tough and play down her femininity, she would have been a very charming woman.

I got the first inkling of her brilliance one day when we were planning the curriculum for the pilot project in the provinces in the north of Portugal. I had been agonising over the best approach, and she came up with the solution immediately. She had a photographic memory and I’ve also never seen anyone join the dots in a situation as quickly as she did. She adopted a combative stance, addressing me as “Wolfe” in a mock friendly way, and always kicking back against anything she perceived to be my pulling rank. After a while, we settled into a comfortable routine.

She tried to find out about my family, and I told her that I was married, that my husband had chosen to return to the UK when the kids were small, that he was a surgeon at a hospital in Holby and that my kids were at uni. I asked her about her own situation and she just gave me a grin and said something about sowing wild oats. I’d seen her out and about with Mitch, one of the contract teachers, a fair bit, but she was caustic and rude to him in public, so I wondered what the dynamic was.

Despite her professional skills, I sensed that she was troubled underneath. In our third week I caught her throwing up in the Ladies’ three times on consecutive days, and asked her what was wrong. To her credit she didn’t give me the old standard of a “dodgy prawn curry” or whatever, but just rinsed her mouth and wiped it defiantly on the back of her hand.

“Some kind of bug,” she said dismissively. “I’ll live”.

I stood looking at her for a while, unsure whether I should take the next step. We barely knew each other, but there was a sort of bond forming and I knew I needed to be ready if necessary to give her my personal as well as professional support.

“A bug of the pregnant variety?” I finally enquired.

Jac just stared me down until I had to break eye contact. Then she went out slamming the door.

“Fuck off, Wolfe”, she said, her back disappearing from view.

Well, that’s telling you, I thought ruefully. Jac contined to ignore whatever it was that was affecting her and I had to admire her grit. But she looked increasingly pale in the mornings and sometimes had to run out in the middle of meetings. She was also avoiding the mid-morning breaks, when everyone usually had coffee and pastries. Finally, I cornered her sitting on the roof terrace when I went up for a cigarette. I sat down next to her.

“Don’t light that thing next to me”, she said.

I put the cigarette away and leaned forward.

“Time to come clean, Naylor”, I said, mimicking her own approach but without aggression.

She squinted up at the sky then turned red-rimmed eyes on me.

“So, I’m pregnant. What’s the big deal? I can still do my job.”

“Obviously you can”, I said. “But that’s not my concern. I want to be sure that you have the support you need so we can both do our jobs. I want you to know I have your back.”

“That’s reassuring”, she said sarcastically.

“Are you planning to go full term?” I asked.

“Well, all credit to you, Wolfe, you didn’t ask me if I was going to have an abortion.”

I remained silent, willing her to open up.

“Yes, I plan to have the child. And, no, Daddy doesn’t figure in those plans.”

“I see. Does the father know?”

“Not yet. And before you jump to conclusions let me just tell you it’s not Mitch. We’re just occasional fuck-buddies, more off than on.”

I could feel myself blushing a little at her words.

“Did that shock you, Mrs Married-with-2-kids? Well, I’m sorry. Not all of us have had the life advantages of someone like you. “

“That’s a rather large assumption you’re making there”, I protested, thinking of my empty marriage and my secret past.

“Yeah. Well. Problem is, the ship carrying the Right Man has sailed. The biological clock is ticking, so when this happened, I just thought Go for it Naylor. Nothing to lose.”

“Right, so you’re going to do this on your own?” I asked, concerned.

“Well, sort of. When I tell Jonny he’s gonna want to be involved. And that’s fine. It’s his kid too. But I don’t want him, just the kid.”

“Do I know Jonny?” I asked.

“Possibly. Skinny, mouthy Scottish guy who teaches the kids’ classes at weekends.”

I had a vague recollection of having met someone answering that description- except that in my memory he was a nice looking, humorous young man who seemed perfectly decent.

“OK, so let’s start as we mean to go on. If you need time off for doctor’s appointments, any kind of health problem, you’ve got it. I know you work bloody hard and I trust you to get the job done. Just don’t play the martyr and nearly kill yourself, OK?”

Jac almost smiled. Then totally changing her tone, she asked.

 “You’ve done all this before. How did your first feel?”

I sat up, my mind zipping back to those early days. Casablanca. I’d found out I was pregnant just days before Marcus and I went back to the UK in late August, at the end of our contracts.  I spent the entire flight back with my head in a sick bag, Marcus all solicitous, quoting pregnancy text books at me. Once we got back, I moved into his flat in Bristol, a place his mother had bought for him when he was a medical student, as I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t fancy confronting my parents with the fact of my pregnancy just yet, and I felt washed out, exhausted and permanently nauseous. Marcus was in his element, playing doctor, making me hot drinks and soup, fussing around. Plainly, he was delighted by the thought of a baby, but all I could think of was ‘How do I get out of this?’ Next thing I knew his mother was round at our place exclaiming in delight and prising my parents’ phone number out of me. From that point onwards, the grandparents took over, planning the wedding and even conspiring over potential names for the baby. I knew I was trapped.

“It was hell”, I replied.


	2. Porto, Portugal, November-December 2012

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bernie and Jac get to know each other better as they work. Bernie tries to support Jac professionally during her pregnancy. Jac is curious about Bernie's marriage and tries to find out more. Meanwhile Bernie is not looking forward to Christmas in England. And she meets a new colleague - enter Alex Dawson.

_Jac_

“It wouldn’t be too bad if I didn’t have to throw up so much on these trips”, I remember saying to Jonny as we lay on my bed one Sunday evening. “And it kind of creeps up on you, not much warning!”

“You didn’t park the tiger on the Ice Queen’s nice interior, I hope?” He had a horrified expression on his face.

“Of course not, idiot. But we’ve had a few near crashes skidding off into the verges! And stop calling her the Ice Queen. What are you? Six?”

Jonny was becoming a bore. Once I told him about the baby and that I intended to keep it, he kept going around with a soppy look on his face telling everyone “I’m gonnae be a dad”.

I made it perfectly clear that the baby would be mine and that he would only have visiting rights, but he insisted on “being there” through the pregnancy and at the birth. I could hardly deny him that right. I was also -between bouts of nausea-feeling as horny as hell, so he served a useful purpose. Jonny was a couple of years younger than me and a very fit footballer, so he could keep up at least! 

When he wasn’t being useful in bed or bringing me cups of tea or whatever, Jonny revealed his more philosophical side, which, frankly, I had little time for.

“So what is Bernie actually like?” he asked me once, a question which caught me momentarily off guard. I hesitated.

“She’s highly organised, a workaholic, and buttoned up tighter than a duck’s arse”, I replied.

“What do you mean, buttoned up?” he insisted.

I’m not sure myself where that phrase came from but it somehow served to describe the way Bernie could be friendly without giving anything personal away at all. Given my situation, where I had had no choice but to open myself up a bit to her, I was amused to see how she reacted when I prodded back. Like a snail curling back into its shell.

The previous Friday we had had to go to Guimarães, a town around 50km from Porto. It took only 40 minutes on the _autostrada_ , but Bernie had had to crawl along in the inside lane while I was feeling nauseous, so the journey took over an hour. At one point she came and hovered behind me while I retched into the bushes.

“There’s no need to watch”, I snapped, backing out and straightening up. She handed me a bottle of water and a wet wipe, her face expressionless. I relented somewhat, accepting the water gratefully.

“Thanks”, I said gruffly.

Bernie folded her arms and leaned against the boot of her silver Clio. She had pushed her driving glasses onto her head and her hair was tied up revealing a long, elegant neck. I felt a little spasm inside looking at her, and I’m sure it wasn't the baby. She was wearing a crisply ironed grey shirt and smart tailored charcoal pants with black Chelsea boots. She looked like a model on the cover of a magazine standing there.

I had discovered something else about her. She carried her perfume in her bag and never wore it when we were in the car first thing in the morning in case it triggered my nausea. I saw her apply it discreetly when we arrived wherever it was we were going. This small gesture of concern touched me, along with the fact that she made all sorts of allowances for me, like starting the journey much too early, stopping whenever I asked, carrying water and wipes etc. Some people would just have given me a sick bag and told me to try to avoid splashing the upholstery.

“Can we sit for a few minutes till my stomach settles?” I asked.

So we sat in the car by the side of the motorway with cars whizzing past us in the grey mist of a chill, late November morning, windows open, me breathing deeply. She smelled fresh, of a citrus scented shower gel or something. I probably smelled of sweat and vomit. I used the wet wipes to freshen myself up and popped a Tic-Tac.

“So how does it work, then, a marriage where you don’t actually live in the same country?” I asked, out of the blue.

She seemed startled by the intrusion but gave a small laugh.

“Well, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder.” But she sounded unconvinced.

“Where were you before you came here?” I asked.

“China, Wuhan,” came the reply.

“Wow! A globe-trotting Wolfe!  And how did Mr. Wolfe feel about that?”

“Not keen on being called Mr. Wolfe, I shouldn't think. I kept my own name when I married.”

“But you can’t have made it home too often?”

“No, twice a year. Lunar New Year and summer. But my daughter was finishing high school and Cameron, my son, was already at medical school when I left for China, so it’s not as if they needed me.”

“And the husband? Doesn’t he need you? Or do you both play away? Open marriage?”

She blushed deeply and looked momentarily flustered, mumbling “No, not at all”, then, recovering herself somewhat she added “We’re both independent people. He’s got his work and his colleagues, he got tired of the travelling.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I thrive on it”, she answered, her face now inscrutable. And she started the engine and closed the windows.

“Come on, we’ve got to get going. There’s a banana there for you if you want.”

_Bernie_

The project was going well, largely because Jac was a rock professionally and took absolutely no nonsense from the bunch at the uni. Between us we made a good pair. She was the planner, the curriculum genius, obsessed with detail, her sharp eyes never failing to spot potential problems and devise solutions to head them off. I was the people manager. She could be gruff with the trainee teachers, but they came grudgingly to respect her. Between us we pushed and pulled and encouraged them into shape, and trained their school and university-based supervisors to observe and analyse, not rush to negative judgement.

Despite what Jac may have said about the father of her baby, Jonny was clearly smitten with her and no matter how rude and dismissive she could be, his relentless good cheer and eternal optimism served both of them well in those difficult first months. I often ran into them when I joined Jamie and João for dinner. They had started a sort of TGIF on Friday evenings for APLI staff in a popular local restaurant, so I had the chance to observe Jac and Jonny outside of work. They seemed to be living together most of the time now, from what I could make out, and Mitch had most definitely been  dumped. I had heard on the APLI grapevine that Jac had been fairly free with her favours before the pregnancy, so I did wonder how she could be sure the baby was Jonny’s, but I wasn’t about to ask.

I was beginning to relax and enjoy Portugal. After the industrial hell hole that was central China, two years of pure misery and inedible food, the warmth and sincerity of the Portuguese people, the laid back lifestyle and the pleasant climate and abundance of excellent and reasonably priced food and wine meant my day to day life was improved by several thousand percent. I had spent the first month on a British Embassy- sponsored language course. With fluent French and fair Spanish already, plus a smattering of Arabic, I took to Portuguese quite comfortably. By the time I met Jac I had basic language skills, almost as good as hers after two years. I had rented an apartment in the cheaper suburb of Vila Nova de Gaia and I had also bought a good second -hand car because the project involved a lot of travel. Driving in Portugal was no picnic, but after previous forays into driving in Turkey and Sri Lanka it was almost civilised.

It crossed my mind that I could carve out a very nice lifestyle for myself here, but then the thought occurred that Marcus would probably want to get in on it. I had a horrible vision of us buying a holiday home in the Algarve so that he could pop down every few weeks for a few rounds of golf with his mates while I played trophy wife and prepared little plates of canapés. I shuddered. So when Marcus suggested the whole family coming over to Portugal for Christmas, I stalled and said I would rather go home to the UK.

By mid- December, Jac’s pregnancy was into the second trimester, and she was due to go to the local hospital for a scan. She told me that she definitely wanted to know the sex of her baby, so this would be the moment, hopefully. Jonny, of course, insisted on accompanying her. On the day of the scan, Jac was uncharacteristically nervous. The appointment was at 11am, and she kept fidgeting and looking at her watch all morning. At 10.15, when she was preparing to gather her things and get a taxi, Jonny called. Jac was pacing.

“For Christ’s sake, Jonny, you know how important this appointment is. Can’t they find someone else just this once?” A pause.

“What? What do you mean you’re the only cover teacher? Well why didn’t you swap with someone in case this happened?”

Finally, she cut the call and threw the phone onto the table. “Useless twat!”

I could see that under her mist of anger she was actually really nervous, so I said

“Come on, I’ll go with you. We can take my car”.

 “You don’t have to do that”, she snapped.

“No, I don’t. But I’ve been there and I know what it’s like. This is just a bit of collegial support”.

I tried to keep my tone light while she glared at me, then she softened.

“OK, well if that’s not taking you away from anything important, I’d be glad of the company”.

In the car she filled me in a bit more on why she was nervous. Jonny had trained as a nurse before becoming an English teacher and had told her that at her age, 35, there was a higher risk of abnormalities with the baby. He suggested she have an amniocentesis test.

“Surely the risk isn’t that high if your family histories are clear?” I asked.

Jac was silent for a moment then she explained that Jonny was worried because she had grown up in a children’s home, her mother had been unable to take care of her, and she had had no contact with her and had no way of discovering whether there were any genetic problems in the family. This was a surprise to me, and I had a sudden pang of sympathy. It explained quite a lot about her behaviour.

“But I refused. No one’s sticking a needle into my stomach! And there’s a risk of miscarriage anyway. I’ll trust the scan to find any abnormalities”.

I shot a look at her and saw the raw fear in her eyes. I patted her hand reassuringly. “I’m sure it will be fine”, I said. “You’ve given up drinking and carousing since you knew about the pregnancy haven’t you?”

“Is that what you think of me? “she seemed almost sad. “I never was much of a drinker, so it was no sacrifice, believe me”.

  _Jac_

Jonny was really upset that he missed the scan and missed seeing our daughter- because it was a girl I was carrying- on the screen. I gave him the print -out, which he pinned to the fridge in my kitchen. He apologised so many times for having forgotten to swap his cover duty with another teacher that I got fed up with him.

“Anyway, I didn’t need you. I had Bernie.”

“But it’s not the same!” he protested. “She’s not your partner and the father of your baby!”

I burst out laughing. “No but the doctor wasn’t so sure!”

The obstetrician, a cheerful Brazilian woman in her 40’s, had greeted us enthusiastically when we entered the room.

_"Ai, que día importante para voc_ _ês”,_  she exclaimed cheerfully.

 “What does she mean?” Bernie asked, puzzled, but before I could explain, the doctor switched to English.

 “So I understand you both have expressed the wish to know the sex of your baby?”

Bernie flushed a deep red and I started to giggle. In the skinny jeans, Converse, plaid shirt and leather jacket she favoured on days when we had no meetings outside, she did, I suppose, look a bit soft butch.

I quickly set the doctor straight, but I could see that Bernie was deeply uncomfortable with the misunderstanding. She sat in a chair next to the scanner and seemed to be retreating into her jacket, her face closed down.

At least the initial hiccup had taken my mind off my nervousness, but when the baby shape in my uterus appeared on the screen I felt a sudden tremor of fear. I reached for Bernie’s hand and gripped it tightly. We both looked at the screen as Fátima, the doctor, announced “It’s a little girl, and everything looks fine”.

In that moment, a very un-Naylor-like wave of emotion came over me, and I looked at Bernie, who was, I could see, equally moved. I squeezed her fingers and felt an answering pressure, and for a second it was almost as if she _were_ my partner, and we were looking at our child together. But the moment passed and she let go of my hand.

A week later, Jamie came into the staff room and announced that English UK, which inspected and audited language schools, was sending an inspector out to us a week before Christmas. Everyone groaned. What with preparing for the festivities, people trying to book holidays etc, they couldn’t have chosen a worse time. The inspector arrived on the appointed day and breezed into the staff room. He made a beeline for me. Jamie was standing apologetically behind him.

“Ms Naylor, I believe.”  I raised my eyes from the textbook I was scanning, and my eyebrows at the intrusion.

“Tom Campbell-Gore, English UK inspector. All in order, I trust.”

I looked him up and down. A grey-haired shortass with another bloody Glaswegian accent, who clearly thought he was the bees knees.

“So it would seem. Doubling as Santa Claus perhaps?”

“Ho, ho, nice one, Ms Naylor. We never stop at English UK, you should know that.”

“Actually, I heard it was because you wanted to get in on the freebie at the Consulate on Friday night?” I said boldly. The fucker. Let him stick that in his pipe and smoke it!

“Well, that was a consideration, I have to admit,” he laughs. “That and meeting the delicious Ms Wolfe, who I hear is on the premises.”

A sort of cold hate rose up in me.  “And where would you have obtained that information?” I asked acidly.

Campbell-Gore tapped the side of his nose and said “Sources”, adding a moment later “So could you find her for me, please?”

“She’s not here today,” I replied frostily, and he eventually wandered off, Jamie almost running to keep up with him.

I have no idea whether he did manage to meet her, but as Bernie was not APLI staff she was not directly involved in the inspection. On the Friday night, the inspection over, and before people started disappearing for the Christmas holidays, the British Consul in Porto had invited all the project participants to a big party. Barbecue in the garden, carol singing, piss up, the usual scenario. Campbell-Gore (“I’m known as TCG”) had definitely wangled an invitation to that one.

Jonny picked me up in a taxi after classes and we headed down the magnificent Avenida de Boavista, which went all the way to the beach at Foz do Douro. When we arrived at the Consul’s palatial mansion, there were cars parked everywhere, lights blazing, noise and people singing. Jonny immediately went off to join his mates and drink his weight in free beer, and I found Bernie in a corner sipping a whisky. Her hair gleamed in the lamplight and her eyes grew warm when she saw me. 

“Don’t tell me you’re hiding, Wolfe?”

 “Not exactly. Just taking stock”, she said, smiling.

“Seems like a lot of people here we don’t know?”

 “Yes, all the English Department at the Uni, plus a few from the Uni in Aveiro.”

 “Aveiro? What’s that to do with us?”

“Aveiro has the best Applied Linguistics Department in the north”, she said. “They’ve seconded a small team to work with us on evaluation. They’ll be starting in January, but they’ve been invited tonight”.

“You’re not exactly rushing to meet them”, I said, seeing her perched uncertainly in a corner of the Consul’s rose garden.

 She shrugged. “We’ll meet them soon enough”.

I went to get myself a ginger ale and, with no desire to join in the singing or merriment,  returned to Bernie, taking another whisky for her. I had a sudden stab of sadness at seeing her so alone and fragile looking.

“Off home for Christmas, then?” I asked.

“Sunday”, she replied, which was December 23rd.

 “Looking forward to it?”  She shrugged.

“Jesus,”, I said, “don't jump for joy! This is Christmas with your husband and children we’re talking about, not a wet weekend in Bognor!”

“It’s complicated”, is all she said, sipping. So I waited. I had been waiting for some time for the Wolfe’s carapace to crack. She was three or four whiskies down and I reckoned it was time. At the moment when she appeared to be on the verge of taking the plunge, a compact figure materialised out of the party background. It held a whisky on the rocks and a large cigar.

“Aha!” beamed TCG. “Berenice Wolfe I presume?”

 “And you are?”  Bernie was unamused.

 “Tom Campbell-Gore, inspector with English UK, proud Holby resident and golf partner of Dr. Marcus Dunn.”

“I see”, Bernie looked down into her glass then back up at him. She was about to make some kind of statement but TCG steam-rollered on.

“I promised your better half I’d check up on you for him, make sure you were behaving yourself”, he boomed, seemingly unaware of the spectacle he was making of himself.

“Well, you seem to have fulfilled your mission”, Bernie said, too mildly, I thought. I felt like coshing him one.

“I thought you ladies could do with some refined masculine company. It was all looking a bit Sapphic from where I was standing”.

Bernie paled but before she could muster a retort, I snorted and indicated my swollen belly. “Hardly” I said, pointing it at it. “That’s draught, not bottled.”

A strange noise like a goose honking filled my ears and I belatedly realised it was Bernie laughing. It was the first time I had heard her laugh, and I laughed along, clutching her arm as we shook and howled together. TCG made his escape.

_Bernie_

I was a bit sorry when Jac went off to find Jonny and their colleagues. I had no desire to be the life and soul of the party, nor the butt of Tom Campbell-Gore’s jokes. Jac’s company was refreshing and I felt her absence. I had had four whiskies, I realised, and I was decidedly mellow. That and tired. Bone tired. The last thing I wanted was to spend Saturday buying presents and the next day returning to the family house in Holby. I could see people casting glances in my direction and knew that seeing me alone would encourage people to come over. I got up and moved purposefully towards the improvised bar, pushing through crowds of merrymakers and avoiding eye contact.

 When I reached the bar, a tall, slim woman with short dark hair was holding up an empty whisky bottle. As I approached, she looked at me and said “Did you want some of this?” I nodded and she held up the bottle and called out to the barman _“Mais uma garrafinha por_ _aquí se faz favor”._

 I smiled at her pronunciation  and the diminutive form of the word _garrafa-_ bottle.

“Picked up Portuguese in Brazil did you?” I asked.

She turned bright green eyes on me and smiled broadly. “Did a one month job there, but bought their version of Teach Yourself Portuguese. Does it sound too daft?”

“No, not at all, it’s charming” I said, meaning it.

“Especially with a Yorkshire accent”, she added, holding out her hand. “Alex Dawson, I’m on the evaluation team at Aveiro.”

 I took her hand, “Bernie Wolfe, Teacher Training lead”, I replied, feeling a tingle travel all down my arm.

Alex meanwhile collected two more whiskies from the barman and indicated the now vacant corner of the rose garden.  “Shall we?”

I felt my tiredness desert me in an instant. “Lead on”, I said.


	3. Porto- Aveiro,  March -April  2013

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bernie and Jac make a trip to Aveiro to meet with their new colleagues, and Jac discovers that Alex is gay, although Bernie doesn't seem to have noticed. As they go into the Easter holidays, Bernie's family join her in the south of Portugal, and Alex makes visits to continue working with Bernie. The friendship between Bernie and Alex develops further and Alex reveals to Bernie that she is gay. Jac and Jonny fight about Jac wanting to attend a conference close to her delivery date.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song is by Portuguese artist Mariza, who started the trend of popularising and updating 'fado', the traditional music of Portugal, which tends to be gloomy and sad. This is a more modern Fado-Style song by songwriter Alexandre O'Neill, from the album "Transparente". You can see her and hear it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up_EG7mvGoQ

**_Bernie_ **

_Há palavras que nos beijam_  
_Como se tivessem boca._  
_Palavras de amor, de esperança,_  
_De imenso amor, de esperança louca._

 I was focusing on the traffic, trying to make sure I didn’t miss the slip road to the autostrada southwards, with Mariza on the music player.

 (There are words which kiss us

As if they had mouths.

Words of love, of hope,

Of immense love, of insane hope.)

“Since when was fado your choice of car music?” asked Jac crossly. She was sitting in the passenger seat, cradling her ever- expanding belly and pushing salt and vinegar crisps into her mouth, making a crunching noise that I was trying to tune out. At least we no longer needed to hug the verges in case of sudden attacks of nausea.

 “It’s good for my language skills”, I answered, indicating left and braking to avoid a big truck that decided to cut me up at the last minute, roaring onto the Arrábida bridge ahead of me. Someone behind me blared on their horn.

 “Goodness, someone’s impatient” Jac exclaimed, lowering her window and sticking her hand outside with middle finger raised.

 “For God’s sake, Jac”, I protested, “don’t incite them to road rage, they don’t need any encouragement”.  

Jac rolled her eyes, rooting around in the glove compartment. “Abba! Dusty Springfield! For fuck’s sake, Wolfe, what are you? A throwback to the Sixties and Seventies?”

_Palavras que nos transportam  
Aonde a noite é mais forte......._

_(Words which take us_

_To the deepest part of the night…)_

“That’s it”, Jac snapped off the music. “If you haven’t got anything worth listening to, let’s have some peace and quiet. Or a conversation. Crisp?”

I shook my head. “I prefer plain. And we have lots of conversations”, I said, distractedly.

  _"_ Not lately _._ You’ve been too busy disappearing off for meetings I don’t seem to be part of”.

 I could feel my cheeks getting warm but I affected a nonchalant tone.

 “You’re on a 50% contract, so why waste your time in boring meetings when there are better things for you to be doing? ”

 “And how often do you hot-foot it down to Aveiro?” she asked, in a tone suggesting she already knew the answer.

 “Er..maybe weekly since January.” More like twice weekly.

 “And doesn’t Dawson come up to Porto sometimes as well?”

 “Mm, sometimes”, I nodded.

 “Are you writing her PhD for her or what?”

I ignored the implied insult. “She’s using data from this project to write her thesis. She’ll be going back to Manchester at the end of June to get the writing up done.”

“Well despite the discomforts of road travel, I’m glad I’ll finally be included in whatever it is you all do during these meetings. I bet it has something to do with the beach, seafood and _vinho verde!”_

I laughed, not a little relieved. The weekly meetings in Aveiro- a university city just under an hour south of Porto- had become more regular since Alex had asked me to help her experiment with some new ideas for generating qualitative data before submitting the methodology section of her thesis to her supervisor. We had several ideas we wanted to try out, some from my own work on teaching in resource- poor environments. Alex had read some of my articles in the English Language Teaching Journal based on my own PhD work in Sri Lanka, fifteen years earlier, and later postings in Turkey and China. While Portugal in the second decade of the twenty-first century was hardly the war-torn Sri Lanka of the 90s, there were teaching strategies that could cross over. Class size in state schools was a factor that determined approach in both contexts, for example. We were still discussing and testing some of these ideas and I didn’t want to bring them into the mainstream of the project until we had a good workable model, which Alex was piloting quietly in Aveiro.

Alex Dawson was a breath of fresh air. I enjoyed Jac’s company but felt I needed to protect myself from her super sharp sensors that had a way of piercing my outer shell. Dr. Berenice Wolfe had spent far too many years building her formidable public persona of intrepid traveller, professional teacher trainer and cool, calm, collected, wife and mother to allow exposure of her faultlines. Also, for some reason I couldn’t explain, I needed to keep Alex and Jac apart, and to screen my growing friendship with Alex from Jac’s scrutiny.

Twenty minutes out of Aveiro Jac announced that she had to pee, so I pulled off the motorway at the next service station. While I was waiting for her, I turned Mariza back on.

_O nome de quem se ama_  
_Letra a letra revelado_  
_No mármore distraído_  
_No papel abandonado_

(The name of the person we love

Revealed letter by letter

On inattentive marble

On an abandoned slip of paper)

Listening to this, I was crushed by a wave of deep sadness. The name I had been suppressing from my consciousness for so many years rose suddenly to the surface- Serena. Just one night in Casablanca in 1988, the memory of which I had carried with me through a tedious marriage, two pregnancies, endless sleepless nights in inhospitable places and whenever I felt obliged to yield to Marcus’ embraces. Closing my eyes to his face, and my other senses to his voice, his smell, and the weight of his body on mine, I took myself back to that special place with Serena, imagining it was her hair tickling my cheek, her hands and lips on my breasts, her fingers thrusting inside me. This was the only way I could get any relief, and the only way I could satisfy Marcus’ illusions of reciprocal pleasure.

_De repente coloridas_  
_Entre palavras sem cor,_  
_Esperadas, inesperadas_  
_Como a poesia ou o amor._

( A sudden burst of colour

Between colourless words,

Expected, unexpected

Like poetry or love.)

 A spasm of memory hit me low in the belly, making me squirm in my seat, so I opened the window and took a big swig of water. Bloody hell, what was wrong with me?  It wouldn’t do for Jac Naylor to see me swooning like a hormonal teenager. By the time she came back, clutching a brown paper bag, I had reverted to my usual outer self.

“Pastry?”  she asked, waving a _pain au raisin_ at me as I turned Mariza off again.

_Jac_

It was good to get out of the big city and breathe some fresh sea air after the meeting. A table had been booked for lunch at a place on one of the _esplanadas_ , recommended by Professor Maria Rosa de Castro Tavares, the formidable head of the Pedagogical Faculty. We were a table of all women, powerful women in the education world, in a restaurant mostly full of loud businessmen and civil servants in suits enjoying boozy lunches.

Rosa Tavares snapped her fingers at a waiter and reeled off a string of commands. There were no menus in sight

“I’ve ordered”, she said in her perfect English, “it saves us time”.  No one protested though I dared raise my eyebrows at Bernie who grinned back as if to say “See why I never brought you before?”

A giant platter of tiger prawns appeared, then several dishes of salad, olives and a basket of bread. The ladies tucked in hungrily, peeling, squeezing lemon, dipping in chilli sauce or mayonnaise while I slowly buttered a piece of bread. This did not escape Tavares’ notice as she asked “Don’t you like seafood?”

“Allergic” I explained.  The fingers snapped again and this time a menu appeared. “Choose what you like”, she said.

I ordered the hake filletswith Russian salad, always a safe choice. I noticed Alex Dawson giving me sympathetic glances as she moved a dish of mayonnaise away from Bernie, who hated the stuff. They seemed to know each other well, Alex passing her the chilli sauce and lemon without being asked.

Another snap of the fingers and bottles of wine appeared. Bernie, Alex and I declined, but our Portuguese colleagues had no such reservations and were soon chatting away, talking about families, children, the forthcoming Easter holidays, anything but work, all through the main course of _arroz de marisco_ , a sort of soupy rice and seafood dish, something I actually would have liked if not for the prawns.

The atmosphere was relaxed and I didn’t feel the need to chat, concentrating on my excellent fish, and discreetly observing Bernie. She seemed less buttoned up than usual, laughing at Alex Dawson’s jokes, talking about her previous experiences in other countries, enjoying the food and company immensely. It was obvious to me that Dawson was gay. There was no pretence- her long, lean form in the tight skinny jeans and Radio Diva T-shirt sent signals to any who might know how to pick them up. She wasn’t exactly shouting it from the rooftops but I could see that Isabel Monteiro, a young, very pretty member of the team was giving her flirtatious looks and making suggestive comments, all of which Dawson studiously ignored. By the time coffee appeared, Monteiro was doing a sulky, pouting number, tossing her hair around in a parody of the rejected girlfriend.

Bernie was plainly oblivious, even though it was clear to both me and Monteiro that she was the object of Dawson’s undivided attention. I had to admit I found the idea of the tightly zipped Bernie Wolfe being hit on by an out lesbian quite entertaining, but at the same time there was a little bell ringing in my head. From everything Bernie had not said, the marriage was obviously some sort of front. She and her husband seemed barely to communicate, and she had hinted more than once that they just stayed together because of the children. Yet the children were on the verge of leaving the protective custody of Mummy and Daddy, so Bernie’s life choices might be expanding in the very near future. I wondered if her married status was actually protecting her from more than just unwelcome advances from men. As I glanced across the table, I was just in time to see Dawson cadging a match from Monteiro and bending to light Bernie’s post-prandial Marlboro. Bernie tucked her messy hair behind her ears before leaning into the flame, her smile lighting up her already beautiful face. I felt a little pang in my stomach, then I looked at Alex, whose expression was one almost of tenderness.

 

_Bernie_

The meeting with our colleagues in Aveiro had gone well, and I had presented the ideas for new techniques in approaching the methodology component that Alex and I had been developing. Jac was very supportive, and our Portuguese colleagues were clearly inspired by our enthusiasm, so it was a good morning, topped off by an excellent group lunch. The only fly in the ointment was Isabel Monteiro, the youngest member of the university team, who raised a number of objections on the grounds that there were cultural differences between what we were proposing and the way teachers expected to be trained. I explained as patiently as possible that it was vitally important to train the teaching practice supervisors in advance, and to get them to take ownership of the techniques so that change could be implemented sustainably. Isabel tried to get Alex to agree with her, citing evidence from some of the observations they had carried out in local schools, but Alex came down firmly on my side. Isabel then sulked for the rest of the meeting.

Rosa Tavares, the faculty head, was keen to push our ideas further forward. “It has occurred to me”, she said, “that these techniques could equally well be transferred to our colleagues who teach other subjects, both in English and Portuguese. This is a very topical subject now – Content and Language Integrated Learning, or CLIL for short. Would you two be willing to lead a workshop on it at the Association of Portuguese Teachers of English conference in Lisbon in May?”

Alex and I looked at each other. “In principle, yes”, I replied. “But we each have other workshops of our own, and I ‘ll probably have to cover Jac’s too – her baby is due about then, so she won’t be able to attend the conference.”

Jac was having none of this. “I’m going”, she said, “and I’m delivering that paper, even if I the baby pops out midway through!”

In the car going back to Porto, Jac continued to airbrush my concerns about her attending the conference.

“And what if you do go into labour early?” I asked. “What about Jonny? Will he go with you?”

“That’s not your concern”, she replied. “Count me in and don’t worry about him.”                                              

  _Jac_

Easter Sunday fell on 31stMarch that year and Jonny had persuaded me to join him and two other colleagues on a cruise up the River Douro.  The day before the holidays started, I asked Bernie what her plans were.

“Marcus is coming over with Charlotte, our daughter. I’m going down to meet them in Lisbon. He’s booked a villa in Cascais for the week.”

“Well, quality time with your daughter, that should be nice.” I smiled brightly, somehow knowing that any mention of the husband was entering dangerous territory.

She sighed. “Oh Charlotte’s bringing a friend so I doubt I’ll see much of her. I’m planning to work on my conference papers.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Hey even Wonder Woman takes a rest sometimes. Go chill. Cocktails on the terrace, sprawl by the pool, that sort of thing.”

“That’s not really me”, Bernie said, but she was trying not to smile.

  _Bernie_

I took the fast Alfa train to Lisbon on Good Friday to meet Marcus so that I could work on the way. I was tired of driving up and down the autostrada with every macho Portuguese driver on my case the whole time. When the train stopped in Aveiro, a familiar tall, slim figure waved to me through the window and got on the train.

“Hello stranger”, I said, smiling, glad I had given her my booking details so that she could keep me company.

“Hey, doesn’t it feel great to be on holiday?” Alex said. her green eyes sparkling. “Well, if not exactly on holiday, at least away from the workplace.”

I put down my pen. “That it does. Fancy a coffee?”

We had arranged that Alex would come out to Cascais every other day from Lisbon to help me draft our shared conference article. This panned out nicely, although when Marcus saw that I intended to work, he initially professed disappointment, but this left him free to head for the local golf club. On the days Alex visited, I asked her to join us for dinner. Marcus was a good cook and always happy to have an appreciative audience, so the long evenings passed more quickly and easily. I’d then run her down to the station in the hire car to catch the last train back to the city. The girls showed up only infrequently most of the time, disappearing to the beach or into Lisbon after breakfast and returning only to change or to grab a snack, so this left me plenty of time to myself.

It was Alex who got me moving again- she would arrive in her running gear and we would head out for an hour before settling down to work. She looked good in her lycra capris and crop top, and I caught Marcus ogling her bottom one morning when we were about to head out. I obviously disapproved, but I can’t say I blamed him, if I’m honest.  She was also less flat chested than she appeared in the T-shirts and work shirts she habitually favoured and I could hardly fail to notice this as we jogged along in our brief tops. Sometimes I caught her looking at me, too, and it gave me a strange feeling.

It was the nights that were the worst. Marcus enjoyed the late Portuguese dinners and the copious amounts of wine and brandy typically consumed in company, and sometimes he would go to the restaurant with his golf chums, arriving after midnight, drunkenly amorous. The first night I professed tiredness from the journey and my work, and he politely left me alone, but in the week we spent in the villa I knew I would have to submit once or twice.

It wasn’t that Marcus repelled me so much as the fact that over the years sex had become an unvarying routine, which was simply boring. I did nothing to prolong it or make it more interesting, and Marcus was probably resigned to that. He always said he loved me, and I had no reason not to believe him. But the Bernie he loved was not the Bernie I knew was hiding inside me. If I let myself become aroused when he started caressing me, it made him happy, it made it easier, but I had to play out the fantasy in my head in order to come. The fantasy was always Serena.

On one particular occasion I just couldn’t concentrate hard enough to get to that point. Marcus had had a lot to drink and I knew he would fall asleep as soon as he had finished. Once he was snoring I rolled quietly out of bed, had a quick shower, then took a spare sheet and pillow from the linen cupboard and lay down on the 3-seater leather sofa in the living room. I was still twitching from the arousal I had not been able to satisfy and as soon as I had wrapped the sheet around myself, my hand went to my breast where the nipple was already painfully hard in anticipation.

I rewound the fantasy to the moment when my 24 year old self had rolled over to kiss Serena, hearing her gasp then pull me closer, feeling the electric connection of our bodies fitting together, the swell of her lower belly  pressing against my thigh. The image was a little blurry after so many years, but it never failed to expose the throbbing nerve of a desire I hadn’t experienced with anyone before or since. I squeezed my breast, remembering the lush fullness of Serena as I worshipped her with my mouth and hands, her back arching with pleasure. By the time the fantasy reached the part where Serena pushed her underwear down, my hand was exploring my own wetness, my clit swollen as I relived Serena’s reaction to my touch, the smooth, wet velvet my fingers encountered, her gasps, the way she rolled her hips against me. It was unwinding too fast, I could hear the ragged sound of my breathing, feel the orgasm about to crest, but I wanted more, to make it last, so I stilled my fingers for a moment and tried to refocus my thoughts. I imagined now that that it was Serena touching me, her fingers stroking me, her voice in my ear. As I touched myself, I called on the ghost of 24 year old Serena to do it harder, to push a finger inside until I could almost convince myself that it was her, that she was there, and hear her whisper “Come for me”. Then it hit me like a giant wave as I lay shaking and panting for a good few minutes, the hand still between my thighs coated in wetness. I came round in the silent darkness of the villa, just the hum of the refrigerator, the whirr of the fan and the far off sound of Marcus snoring. The pillow was wet with tears, I realised. I had never felt so empty in my life.

Two days before the end of our holiday, Marcus decided to go shopping for souvenirs with the girls. Alex and I had almost finished our work, so in the afternoon we decided to use the small pool at the villa and just relax. As we lay on loungers after a swim, I thought to ask her whether she had a boyfriend waiting at home.

“Nope. And no girlfriend at the moment either. I’m gay”, she said simply.

I turned my head to look at her, momentarily shocked. How had I not picked that up ?

“I thought you knew,” she said. “Everyone else seems to. I do quite often walk around with clues on my chest”, she chuckled.

I thought back to the T-shirts I had seen her wear, then realised that I wouldn’t recognise any LGBT references even if they were staring me in the face. The simple fact was that I preferred not to see or think about it.

“Sorry, that was a bit dim of me”, I said. 

“Well, I did wonder about you, you know, when we first met. Those plaid shirts you wear!”

I felt my cheeks get hot. “Plaid shirts?”

“Yeah, you know, sort of a lesbian ID code”, she said. “But then I found out you were happily married so it could hardly be true. You just liked plaid shirts.”

I looked at her for a long moment, wondering if she was being sarcastic, but saw no trace of irony.

“I might be a bit oblivious to the signs, but I did pick up that Isabel Monteiro seems to have a crush on you.”

Alex sighed. “Yeah. More than. To be honest I’ve had to fight her off a few times.”

“Well she’s cute at least”, I said, thinking of her petite figure, long eyelashes and the shiny shoulder length locks that she liked to toss around.

“If you like lipstick and frills, that is,” said Alex. “Not my thing at all, but apart from that she’s just so immature and needy. I came out of a longish relationship with someone a bit like that before I came here so I’m alert to the danger signs. Also, she’s too young.”

“Ha ha, what is she? 30? And you’re what- 32?”

“I’m 33, but I prefer older women.”

Despite myself I was fascinated and I wanted to know more. I propped myself up on my elbow and reached for my iced tea. I could see Alex trying not to look at my breasts when I leaned forward.

“So what’s your ideal kind of woman?” I asked, genuinely curious and moving an arm protectively across my breasts.

She was silent for a few minutes, then raised her clear green eyes to meet mine.

“Well, if I’m honest it would be someone like you”, she said. “But not straight, of course. I mean a single, older gay woman, fit, intelligent, independent, mature, attractive etc”.

 “Oh” I said. “Right.”

  _Jac_

 The Easter break on the river should have been relaxing, but I had a huge ongoing row with Jonny as he tried to persuade me not to go to the Teachers’ Conference in Lisbon in case I went into early labour.

 “There are three reasons why I’m going,” I told him. “Number one: this is my work and no one else is going to represent me. Number two: the baby isn’t due till around May 12th, so I will be back here by that date. Number three: in the event of an emergency there are hospitals in Lisbon. People have babies all the time, it’s no big deal.”

 “But it’s a risk going so close to the date,” Jonny protested. “And I want to be there, it’s my baby, too! “

 “So get time off if it means that much to you”, I said, exasperated.

 “You know I can’t do that, not while we have exams on and a full timetable. And with you on maternity leave by then, we’ll be short-staffed. they’ll never allow it”.

 “Well there you are. Tough titty. Now shut up, it may never happen!”

When I waddled into the first morning meeting after the holiday, still seething from my row with Jonny, I noticed that Bernie looked refreshed and lightly tanned. She had had her hair trimmed and lightened and was wearing a new pale green shirt.

“So you took my advice”, I grinned, arranging the uncomfortable football of my belly as I sat down. “You chilled”.

“Oh I’d hardly call it that, but I got back into running, and spent plenty of time outdoors in between drafting these papers”, her face lighting up as she smiled at me.

“Good for you, Wolfe. Now let’s go over these schedules for the student teacher assessment visits.”

“You’re due to start maternity leave next week”, Bernie reminded me.

“Forget that”, I said. “I want to see this thing through to the end of this academic year at least. So forget I’m pregnant and bash on.”

 Bernie opened her mouth to challenge me then realised it would be a waste of time and shut it. She was learning.


	4. Porto-Lisbon, April - May 2013

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bernie learns that her contract will not be renewed. Jac, Bernie, Alex and the others head for the conference in Lisbon. Jonny is worried that Jac may give birth prematurely. In Lisbon, things go well until Jac accidentally locks herself in the bathroom. Bernie and Alex go out for a drink and end up in a gay bar.

_Bernie_

The run up to the Teachers’ conference in Lisbon was hectic. I had my own paper on teacher training to write, plus the joint one with Alex, on techniques for teaching other subjects through English. I was also mindful of the fact that Jac might need cover, so I kept an eye on her workshop planning too. Alex and I had pretty much finished ours and I emailed her the draft we had agreed for her to polish up, thus removing the need for a face to face meeting.

 She came to Porto once in this period, with Professor Rosa Tavares and her deputy, Graça Machado, for the Annual Review Meeting, which would determine the future direction of the project. I hadn’t seen Alex since the day she told me she was gay, and I found that I had missed her warm, earthy humour and the friendship we seemed to have develop between us. She winked at me as we took our places in the meeting room at the university, but as we were seated with teams from our own institutions, we didn’t get the chance to talk.

The meeting was dominated by the bunch from the faculty in Porto who insisted on being offered better financial terms if they were to continue their work for the following year. One of the key points they made was that the role of Teacher Training lead could easily be taken by one of their own lecturers, and that an expensive import (ie me) was unnecessary. I saw Jac, sitting opposite me, roll her eyes but I kept my face as blank as possible, not wanting to get embroiled in the row. Jamie, representing APLI, the language school partner, insisted that the role of Teacher Training lead needed to be an outsider in order to avoid exactly that factionalism which had so dogged our work with their staff so far. The leader of the Porto bunch, Professor Abílio Vaz, a short, red-faced textbook writer who had spent a number of years in the US, and who was an enthusiastic participant in any and every TV programme about language teaching, then turned to Rosa Tavares and pleaded for her support. Surely, he argued, their specialist evaluation unit was also more than capable of running its own show, and the imported specialist (ie Alex) was no more than window dressing for the EU, like me?  The Project Director and chair of the meeting, a Belgian academic appointed by the EU, could be heard tapping his pencil nervously on the desk as he listened to the arguments.

 Rosa Tavares was a very cool customer. She squashed Vaz like a cockroach by making it perfectly clear that Alex, a non-EU appointee who was actually on secondment from the University of Manchester, would be finishing her assignment in June and that her contribution to the work of the evaluation team was significant and that they had benefitted massively from her input. She then put a very strong case for having an externally appointed Teacher Training Team Leader, and said some very nice things about me, too, but at the end of the day, the budget would be the deciding factor and we all knew that. After much arguing and more passionate outpourings from the obnoxious Vaz, who seemed to be angling for my position himself, it was agreed that the current Teacher Training Team Leader post would be terminated in September, and that I would hand over to a local appointee from a different institution who would carry on implementing the recommendations made in the Annual Report.

 As we filed out after the meeting, Alex worked her way towards me. Today she was wearing a smart white blouse and pin-striped pants that rode low on her hips.

 “Bit of a blow”, she said as we helped ourselves to coffee from the refreshment table.

 "Yes, I was kind of enjoying it”, I sighed, not at all happy that I would be looking for another job so soon.

 “Well, once my thesis is submitted, I’ll be looking for a new job, too,” Alex said. “Maybe we could try to sell ourselves as a team. What do you think?”

 “Ha, Wolfe and Dawson”, I sniggered, “sounds like a firm of dodgy solicitors”.

 Alex gave my shoulder a nudge. “Well you never know,”, she said, “it could bring us fame and fortune.”

 I raised my eyebrows. “So that’s what you’re after, is it?” I joked. Alex just smiled back cryptically.

_Jac_

To say that I was outraged by the underhand attempt of the repellent Vaz to make a grab for Bernie’s job would be to state the obvious. The idea of having to endure the following year in a team with his flunkeys without Bernie’s expert guiding hand filled me with horror. It mattered little that in the end Vaz was overruled, the new team leader wouldn’t be Bernie. 

 Jonny had been talking about going back to the UK. “I want to do a Master’s in Teaching Young Learners”, he said, “so it would be a good time to go home, with a baby and all.”

“And what makes you think I want to live with you?” I asked caustically, although there was a glimmer of sense in what he was proposing.

“Money”, he said simply. “You need to work or hire child support. I could do an online course or a part-distance course, then I could take care of the baby while you earn the readies.”

“And what about when you’re in the middle of your module and she’s teething?” I asked.

“OK, OK so we might need a bit of help occasionally, I agree, But the point is, if we stick together we can manage better financially.”

His reasoning was sound- no way was I going to be housebound once I had given birth. But I didn’t want my daughter to spend her first years with a stranger either, so Jonny could be useful. He was her dad after all, and he had nursing training.

“Look, I have an idea”, he said. “My brother lives near Holby, he and his partner have two bairns and both work from home most of the time. She’s a translator and he’s an IT consultant.  If we move near them, maybe we could help each other.”

“Let me think about it”, is all I said.

“So now there’s no need to go to the conference in Lisbon, if you know we’ll be going home”, Jonny added hopefully.

“Forget it, Jock, I’m going and that’s that. If you’re so worried about your kid being born on a pavement or something you’d better find a way of beaming yourself down there.  I’m going and I’ll be perfectly safe with Bernie”.

  _Bernie_

Although disappointed that my contract would not be renewed, I was determined to do my best to complete all my project reports and workshops in the time remaining. I also intended to shape some of my own data into articles for the ELTJ and other publications. I was nearing fifty, and I needed to keep my CV up to date. I had already decided that there was no point in going back to the UK in summer- I could give up my apartment, hire a house of some sort outside the city and invite the family over whenever they wanted while I kept on working. With this decision made, I felt a weight off my chest, and could concentrate on the upcoming event. Marcus also didn’t seem too worried when I told him, and in fact even welcomed the idea, so I was all set.

It had been agreed that I would drive Jac to Lisbon early on the first day of the conference, which was a Friday, so that we could go at our own pace and stop if needed, rather than being confined on a train.

When I pulled up outside Jac’s apartment block at 6am, she was there on the pavement with a trolley and Jonny, holding a backpack and pacing nervously.

“Now you promise to call me the moment you have any contractions”, he insisted as Jac squeezed herself and the bump into the passenger seat of my Clio, which I had pushed back to the maximum.”

“Yes, yes, I promise, now just put that backpack on the rear seat and leave us to it. We’ll be fine.”

Jonny’s eyes met mine in a plea for complicity.

“Bernie, I have your number, and I’m gonnae text you mine. Please don’t hesitate. I’ll leave a class if I need to. And drive safely.“

I felt a certain sympathy for him. Jac gave no quarter and I was far from certain that I was the ideal companion if she did go into labour. I smiled to reassure him and said “Don’t worry, Jonny, we’ll be fine.”

Jac scowled as we drove off and said “He’s actually bought those 10 euro Ryanair tickets to Lisbon for four different flights in case of emergency. It’ll take him longer to get to the airport than the flight itself!”

“Well, at least he’s not locking you in the bedroom! When I was having Cam, Marcus insisted on knowing where I was every minute of the day. As soon as I started getting contractions, he was there, monitoring them.”

"Well your husband is a doctor! “

“He’s an orthopaedic surgeon, not an obstetrician. More of a hindrance than a help, in fact.”

“What about your second child? How did that go?”

“Caesarean. She was a breech, so they didn’t want to take the risk of turning her. Luckily, when that decision was made, Marcus was in theatre himself,  so by the time he got there it was too late for him to tell them what to do”.

I smiled to myself at the memory. Marcus had actually been very sweet when he came to find me and baby Charlotte. He had agreed to let me name her after my grandmother, who had died when I was 10, and he was very gentle with both of us after her rather traumatic entry into the world.

“Well at least this one seems to be in the right position,” Jac said. “Let’s just hope she can hang on a bit.” 

_Jac_

My show of bravado in front of Jonny when I left Porto that morning was mostly just to stop him from fussing. I had been having what my doctor called Braxton-Hicks contractions for a while, and sometimes they were strong and quite painful. I usually had to sit down and practise deep breathing for a few minutes until the movement stopped. Fátima had assured me that this did not mean that labour was starting, but it was scary nonetheless.

The journey passed uneventfully apart from the four pee stops I had to make, and we got to our hotel by 10 am. The project was paying for our attendance at the conference but they had asked us to share rooms where possible, or choose a more downmarket hotel further away. Normally I wouldn’t have wanted to share a room with a colleague, but in this case I was a bit relieved. I asked Bernie if she would mind, and she, of course, said no, even if she really thought I was a thumping great nuisance.

When we were checking in, I saw Jamie and João arrive right behind us, and felt even more relieved. João was a general surgeon at one of the top hospitals in Porto, so that signalled a bit more support.

“Risking it a bit, aren’t you?” he enquired, laying his hand gently on my distended abdomen.

“With you around, I know I have nothing to fear!” I exclaimed. Everyone knew the story of how João had once delivered a baby on a public bus, he got teased about it all the time.

During lunch, Alex Dawson joined our APLI table. I noticed immediately that she made straight for the seat next to Bernie and that Bernie was very pleased to see her. Again I wondered about their connection. Bernie had unwound a little with me but we had never had a repeat of that moment before Christmas when I thought she was about to tell me some dark secrets  about her marriage. The professional connection between Wolfe and Dawson, on the other hand, was undeniable. They just clicked, and being in a workshop with them was a great experience. Dawson was the evaluation specialist, Bernie the methodologist. Between them they had made a number of  tweaks to our project that that improved the outcome by several hundred percent. I didn’t know Dawson well, in fact I hardly had anything to do with her, but Bernie was always talking her up. I thought they ought to write a book or something.

“Where’s Dizzy Izzie?”  I asked mischievously as we shared platters of fruit for dessert. It had occurred to me that if everyone was room sharing, then the more senior Tavares and Machado would obviously bunk up together, leaving Isabel Monteiro, the junior member of the team, with the outsider.

Dawson grinned and pushed her hair back in a boyish gesture.

“Coming tomorrow……. with her mother, who’s visiting from Madeira. Seems Mama wanted to see her little girl in action.”

Everyone laughed. I said “So lucky you, Dawson, get a room to yourself.”

She grinned and pointed at Jamie “Seems I might have ended up with him, as we were both the odd ones out, but bringing hubby saved him”.

“We are paying for our room”, protested Jamie, but he was laughing.

In the general merriment I was hoping no one noticed that a huge contraction had suddenly hit me so that I was gasping, holding my hands over my belly, but Bernie, of course, was onto it.

“You OK?” she murmured.

“Just another Braxton-Hicks” I muttered between gritted teeth and hoping I was right.

“Come on, let’s get up to the room and have a rest before the fun starts,” she said, rising to her feet and offering me her arm, which I ignored.

The rest of the day was fine, no more violent contractions just a few minor ones I had learned to recognise, and I was able to sit through the first day’s proceedings without any problems.

My workshop was scheduled for the early slot in the morning, and as I was tired and had a killing backache I cried off dinner and ordered room service, deciding to treat myself to a long bath. Bernie offered to stay with me but I could see Dawson hopping around in the corridor, keen to take her off somewhere and I was perfectly happy to be by myself, so once she had dressed down into her usual casual gear, Bernie headed out, making me promise to call the moment I needed her.

I was almost asleep when she let herself quietly back into the room. It must have been midnight. I switched on the reading lamp.

“Nice evening?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, it was good. João knows all the best seafood restaurants, and then they insisted on going for a nightcap, so it’s later than I planned to be”. She gathered her night things and sponge bag from her holdall and paused.

“A funny thing happened”, she sniggered. “A guy came round trying to sell roses, and he obviously thought we were two couples, so he tried to make João buy a rose for Alex, and Jamie one for me. So João bought one and then presented it to Jamie. You should have seen the seller’s face, it was a picture”.

She headed for the bathroom to get ready for bed, and I thought about that foursome out on the town- two very gay guys, one very gay woman and Bernie. The irony of “two couples” didn’t seem to have occurred to her. I turned carefully onto my other side and closed my eyes.

_Bernie_

Jac’s workshop on curriculum planning went off very well. She had designed it as a hands-on experience so that the audience, who were mostly secondary school teachers, had to interact and participate. I acted as her backup, and went round the groups checking on their work while she rested at the front. As we were packing up to leave, I saw she was biting her lip.

“Pains?” I asked, and she nodded. I got all her stuff together and led her unprotesting to the lift. Once we got into the room, I helped her onto the bed.

“Do you need me to stay with you a bit?” I asked.

“Of course not”, was the cross reply, so I went off to attend the plenary discussion led by Rosa Tavares, with her team members, including Alex, on the panel.

By the time I got back to the room, Jac was reading a journal. She peered at me over her glasses.

“Stop fussing like a mother hen, Wolfe. I don’t need watching every minute of the day.” She then rolled somewhat inelegantly off the bed. “Let’s go down to lunch.”

In the afternoon I gave Jac more space. I had my own workshop to deal with, which she attended, and which I think went well, then there was a project dinner organised in the hotel that evening for those of us attending the conference, a fairly low-key affair, but pleasant enough. Jac seemed fine and went back to the room afterwards to prepare for a forum she wanted to attend the following morning.

Alex pulled me to one side.  “Fancy a drink? There’s a great bar I discovered when I was here at Easter- it’s a bit of a walk and uphill, but the exercise should do us good.” I was still on a high from my workshop and didn’t feel tired. This sounded fine. I texted Jac “Going for a drink. Call if u need me”.

The bar was low-lit and had a pleasant vibe. A huge relief after the savage climb up the steps leading to the  _Bairro Alto._  I was regretting not having kept up the running since Easter. Alex was barely puffing, but I felt almost every one of my forty-eight years.

“Bit of a walk! Huh!” I said, making for a vacant table and collapsing in a chair.

A waitress appeared in slashed denim, with cropped top, tattoos and a ring through her nose. She also had a very pretty face. Alex switched on her most flirtatious smile and in her excruciating Brazilian accent asked “What’s the cocktail special tonight?”

I went with it, the cocktails were delicious whatever was in them and the pretty waitress, who obviously had eyes for Alex, kept them coming. I felt myself relaxing in a way I hadn’t for a very long time. It was somewhere in the middle of the third cocktail that I noticed that all the surrounding tables were occupied by only women, and that one corner of the bar area was only men.

“Um..is this a gay bar?” I asked Alex.

“Not exclusively”, Alex replied, her eyes twinkling. “It’s what the listings call ‘gay friendly’.”

“Right”. I had no answer to that, but then, somewhat belatedly it occurred to me that I might be cramping Alex’ style.

“Look, if there’s someone you ..er.. I mean….don’t let me stop you, if you want me to ….” indicating with my hand towards the door.  

Alex laughed and put her hand over mine to still it. “Just chill, Bernie. It’s no big deal. I chose this place because I thought we’d be free of men trying to hit on both of us, not because I want to pick someone up. Besides, the other patrons are looking at me enviously, so that does wonders for my street cred.”

That took a while to sink in, and when it did, I blushed automatically. I could also still feel her hand on mine even though she had already removed it. I covered my embarrassment with my trademark honking laugh. “Don’t get cocky Dawson, or you could find yourself doing that workshop minus the Wolfe part tomorrow”.

By the time we decided to head back to the hotel, we were decidedly mellow, though not drunk, and Alex warned me to keep my bag close to my chest as pickpockets were always active in this area. It was a good thing I did, because I felt my iPhone vibrating through the material of my bag before I heard it ring. I stopped and ripped it out of the compartment. Jac.

“Contractions coming every fifteen minutes” she panted.

“How long has this been happening?” I demanded.

“Couple of hours.”

“Jac, you need to call to reception, see if you can get an ambulance or a doctor.”

“Water’s not broken yet…just get here Wolfe,” and she hung up.

I looked at Alex and we started to run. As soon as we hit the hotel lobby I called Jamie, but João was out drinking with his old friends from medical school and Jamie didn’t know where he was. He promised to call and alert him.

“Talk to reception”, I ordered Alex. “See if we can get her into a hospital, or get a midwife or something here. It’s a week early, so we don’t know what the problems might be.”

When I got in the room, there was no sign of Jac but the bathroom door was closed.

“Jac”, I shouted, banging on the door.

“It’s fine, I just needed to use the toilet”, she called back. “I’ll be out soon”.

I started pacing. Should I call Jonny? What if this was another false alarm? Shit, where was João?

After five minutes Jac was still in the bathroom.

“Are you OK?” I shouted. There was a groaning sound, then I heard her say “Fuck, it hurts.”

 “Jac, open the door,” I yelled, trying to remember the drills I had learned from my own childbirth experiences twenty years before.

The door handle turned but nothing happened. Then it turned again. Then Jac shouted “Fucking lock’s stuck.”

I tried from the outside but it was locked fast.

“It’s one of those pop locks”, Jac yelled, “and it won’t move”.

“OK hold on, let me get someone”, I called, grabbing the room phone. Trying to keep my voice steady and to speak clearly in Portuguese I gave my room number, 532, and asked for a technician to come and release the lock. The receptionist answered in English. “This is out of hours, Madam, we don’t have a technician available at the moment.”

I pushed down my panic and said “The bathroom lock is jammed and there’s a woman about to have a baby. I need help right now!” 

To her credit she responded quickly. “OK let me see what I can do. Just hold on. Your friend in 531 has asked us to send for medical attention and we have a midwife on the way.”

At this point Alex knocked on the door and I let her in. When she saw the lock problem she said “I have a screwdriver in my kit,“ and ran next door to find it.

Together we tried to unscrew the lock with Alex’s mini Phillips head,  Jac groaning and yelling on the other side of the door telling us that her waters had broken. I shouted instructions, telling her to breathe, to lie down on the floor on a clean towel, asking her to time the contractions, which were coming faster now. Suddenly the receptionist herself appeared clutching a tool kit and tried to help us. We managed to get the lock unscrewed but couldn’t figure out how to release it. Finally, when we seemed to have loosened it, the sound of Jac’s evident distress and the imminence of the birth, not to mention the effects of several potent cocktails drove me to make a rash decision. I looked at Alex and she caught on immediately. Together we stood and I said “One, two, three” and we threw our combined weight against the door, causing the wood to splinter, but the lock finally gave and we were in. The receptionist was aghast but I sent her off with Alex to look for the midwife, promising to pay for any damage.

  _Jac_

My daughter, Emma, was born on the bathroom floor of a Lisbon hotel at 2.04 am, one week prematurely. She was almost born in captivity, if that’s what I could call being locked in a bathroom. Why I popped the stupid lock I’ll never know. Habit, I guess. But Bernie Wolfe came good. She and Dawson partly dismantled the lock and smashed the door in, then Bernie was just in time to deliver Emma. By the time the midwife arrived, panting, Bernie had just placed her on my chest, and the midwife was able to take over from there. I was exhausted, all the fear, panic and the effort of childbirth had drained me, and I don’t remember much about the next part, where Bernie and the midwife got me cleaned up and in bed, and Emma wrapped in a clean pillowcase until we could find something more appropriate.

 Bernie also looked shattered. She had crashed out fully dressed on the other bed as it was by now 3.30am and the midwife had departed, having promised to return to check on me next day. Suddenly there was a pounding on the door and a voice shouting “Let me in”.

As soon as Bernie reached the door, she was shoved back against the wall by the force of Jonny’s entry, as he dropped his rucksack on the floor, and practically tripped over himself in his haste to get a look at our perfect daughter lying in my arms.

Bernie was wringing her hands. “I’m so, so sorry, Jonny, I forgot to call you when all this kicked off”.

Jonny smiled “Nay worries, Bernie. Jamie called me this afternoon and arranged cover for me tomorrow. I got the train after my last class- just took a while, and it broke down in Coimbra. Bit of a long story. But I’m here.”

“And all those Ryanair tickets?” I asked slyly.

 


	5. Lisbon-Porto, May-June 2013

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter, where Bernie and Jac part company, and Bernie prepares to finish the year and reunite with her family. In the meantime, she drops her guard with Alex.

_Bernie_

The adrenaline of our race back to the hotel and the subsequent drama had left me drained. When Jonny arrived, I told them I would move next door and leave them alone, so I quietly grabbed my holdall and threw my clothes and toiletries inside. I don’t think they even noticed me leaving, so absorbed were they with the baby.

 Alex answered the door in shorts and a vest, obviously still awake and expecting me.  

“Come in, I guess you need a bed,” she said, gesturing to the twin in her room.

 “That would be most kind. And it means the Wolfe and Dawson show is now back on the road for tomorrow.”

 Alex laughed and flopped back down on the bed, her nipples visible through the thin top.

 I immediately averted my eyes and began fumbling in my bag, letting out a groan as I did so. I had obviously damaged my shoulder when I bashed the door down.

 Alex was on her feet in an instant “Hey, did you hurt yourself more than that door?”

 I grimaced. “Looks like it but..” seeing her approaching “I’ll be fine. Just need a hot shower”, and I fled to the bathroom before she could start fussing over it.

 I went out like a light as soon as my head touched the pillow, and next thing I remember is Alex shaking me and telling me to get up, because our workshop was first on the agenda, at 9am. She was already dressed, so I jumped in the shower while she called room service for coffee and croissants. By 8.50 am we were setting up the meeting room. The session was packed, there were teachers spilling out of the door, and staff bringing more chairs for people to squeeze in the back. I had no time to check on Jac or talk to anyone else, it was all systems go.

 When we had finished, I ran into Jamie who, thankfully, had sorted the problem of the bathroom door and sent a very hungover and sheepish João to make arrangements for Jac and Jonny to stay in Lisbon at a friend’s house for another 3 or 4 days while mother and baby could be checked over in the local hospital.

 The conference ended at lunchtime, and I offered Alex a lift back to Aveiro. We were very much at ease in each other’s company by now, but I was conscious of a niggling worry about the way she sometimes looked at me, and, more importantly, the way my stomach flipped when she did. I tried to keep the jokey mood going and by the time we pulled into her street, I was confident that we were back on our professional track.

 “You know what, Wolfe, we make a great team! I think we should write that workshop up for ELTJ or The Teacher Trainer.”

 I nodded my assent.

 “And give some more thought to joint job applications. I’ve heard that projects sometimes headhunt professionals who work in teams or pairs.”

 “It’s a thought, and something new for me, but let’s meet before you go back to discuss it.”

 “Can I tempt you with a drink before you get back on the road?” she asked.

 I shook my head. “Better not, I’ve got classes early tomorrow.”  I gripped the steering wheel tightly, trying to hide the pain I still had in my shoulder, and the fact that all I really wanted was a glass of whisky and a hot bath.

 “OK”, Alex said cheerfully, and as I turned to say goodbye, she suddenly leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips. At first I barely registered what was happening, then I went into shock. Her lips were soft and warm, only slightly parted. I didn’t move, and she withdrew after a couple of seconds and got out of the car. Her eyes were sparkling with warmth and I felt her loss as soon as she had gone. Speechless, I put the car into gear and waved numbly as I drove off.

All the way to Porto, my eyes fixed on the road, I felt the pressure of her lips and inhaled the lingering scent of her light, fruity cologne. I was still in shock, but my confused brain was registering pleasure. How could such a tiny, apparently insignificant gesture create such a disproportionate thrill?

I tried to put it out of my mind, but whenever I relaxed my grip on my thoughts, back it came. By the time I went to bed, I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable- partly aroused and partly terrified. The ghost of Serena, of one night in Casablanca, coming back to haunt me. Not that Alex was in any way like Serena, but she was interested in me- in a sexual way, I could see that now, and she had no hangups about it.

 I slept badly, on and off all night, and in the early morning had an erotic dream about Serena. But just as she was about to kiss me in the dream, she morphed into Alex. I awoke, my heart pounding. What was happening to me? Was I attracted to Alex, or as it just that someone was showing interest in me after years of drought?

 I did what I usually did to stifle any rogue sexual impulses- put on my running gear and tried to sweat it out of my system.

 I didn’t see Alex again until mid-June, and in that time I had almost convinced myself that the kiss never happened. I fell back into my routine of work, running, skyping Marcus and the kids, and making plans to rent a house for the summer. I attended baby Emma’s christening and met Jonny’s family, who had come over to help Jac and Jonny make the move back to the UK. Jac completed her work for the project and we took our leave of each other. She was one of the best professionals I had ever worked with and she certainly deserved to have a brilliant career.

 Then, on the 24thJune, the Aveiro team came to Porto for a meeting in the morning to discuss our joint contribution to the Annual Report, which would be submitted to the EU at the end of July. The 24thJune is the Festival of Sao Joao, when all of Porto goes crazy, walking the streets bashing people over the head with young garlic bulbs and grilling sardines over braziers. One of the Portuguese APLI teachers was having a _Sardinhada_ at her family house overlooking the River Douro and we were all invited. Jamie saw Alex and I leaving the meeting together in the morning and spontaneously invited her to the party in the evening.

 “You can crash with us”, he told her, “we live just ten minutes down the road”.

I was immensely relieved when he said that because I had been agonising over whether to invite her to stay with me, and the conflicting feelings I had about being alone with her. Alex had brought an overnight bag as she had wanted to see the festival anyway, so we all went out for lunch and hung out at Jamie and Joao’s place in the afternoon, preparing food we planned to take to the party.

 The house we were invited to had been built by an architect who had designed it to hang over the river. It had a spectacular balcony and floor to ceiling windows in the front rooms and plenty of space outside for grilling sardines. The wine was flowing and jokes were circulating. The Brits were demonstrating their sardine-grilling prowess and the Portuguese poured more wine and laughed. I think we were all a little drunk, and certainly high on end-of-the year adrenaline. Then late in the evening, Joao called “Look, you can see the fireworks from the terrace!”. Everyone raced upstairs to watch. I was feeling a little chilly, so I stepped into one of the rooms where I had left my bag and fished out a hooded zip-front sweatshirt. As I started to put it on, the door to the ensuite bathroom opened and Alex came out. Her eyes met mine.

 “Cold?” she asked, as she moved towards me, which was the only way out of the room.

 I could feel my heart beating faster as she came nearer, the alcohol slowing my natural flight response as I stood, sweatshirt half on, half off. She stepped confidently into my body space and gently pushed it down my arms. Then taking my head in her hands she murmured “You don’t need that” as her lips came down on mine, and I was lost.

How long we were in that room and how no one came in, I’ll never know. My resistance just crumbled, all the reserve I had built up over the last 25 years since those precious moments with Serena, evaporated the instant Alex’s tongue found mine, and I was kissing her back as if my life depended on it. I could hear myself panting and feel her heart racing as fast as mine. She had pulled up my T-shirt and was struggling with my bra while I lay there unable to do anything except roll with the waves of pleasure that closed my mind to any other thought. I felt her mouth on my breasts and I groaned, arching under her as she whispered “Oh God, I want you so much”. I don’t remember the moment when she got my jeans undone but I was shaking with desire and it was a matter of seconds, probably, before I was clenching around her fingers, the orgasm tearing through me like a huge release of twenty-five years of tension.

As soon as I came round to find her lying on me, her fingers still in me, I became aware that the door to the room was unlocked and that anyone might come in. I tugged at her arm

“Alex”, I hissed, “we can’t stay here.”. 

She looked at me as the anxiety reflected in my eyes prompted a response.  She withdrew her hand and sat up as both of us refastened our bras, and I stood up to zip my jeans. She had a stunned look on her face and was moving too slowly. I felt the panic begin to invade me, and the chill of the night cool the sweat on my skin.

“Go” I insisted, pushing her towards the door as I went to lock myself in the bathroom. She leaned over to kiss me again but I pushed her away. “Go back upstairs, don’t let them think we’ve been together”.

By the time I rejoined the others on the terrace, Alex had a glass of wine in her hand and was talking to the owner of the house about the paintings in the living room. I grabbed another glass and made my way over to Jamie as if I had been hanging around all the time. A discreet look at my watch showed that we had been absent only about twelve minutes, so the chances of anyone noticing were slight, and the fireworks, which were spectacular, had kept everyone’s attention focused elsewhere.

Later, we dispersed, Alex with Jamie and Joao, and me to a taxi to get back to my apartment. There was no chance to talk or say anything and I was in a sort of frozen horror in case anyone could work out what had happened between us.

 

**Holby, September, 2013**

Marcus and I got back to Holby after packing up the house and selling my car at the end of August. My contract technically expired on August 31st but we had completed all our reports by July 31st, and August was a holiday month.

It had been a pleasant, lazy summer. Marcus had come over twice, first for a long weekend, then for a week at the end to help me pack up. Cameron and Charlotte had come and gone in the middle of the month, and the rest of the time I had spent writing up my articles and getting my CV in order.

I did everything in my power not to think about what had happened with Alex at that party. I wasn’t an unfaithful person and it horrified me to think I had cheated on my husband, a man who said he loved me and appeared to have eyes for no one but me. Yet our marriage had long gone stale, I was sure he must feel the same way, although we had never broached the subject.

Alex called me the day after the party, as I guessed she would, and I had backtracked, like the coward I was. We were drunk, it was just an error of judgement, I was married, I couldn’t do this. Alex was disappointed, as was I. Disappointed in myself for having yet again denied my true nature, hiding behind my respectable exterior, fighting my own instincts, the response I had crafted over twenty-five years of denial.

Yet somewhere in those long weeks, in the thought gaps between paragraphs of my scholarly articles, while I was mindlessly washing up, and in the deeper recesses of the hot nights when sleep evaded me, the sensation of Alex’s mouth and hands on me, the smell and taste of her skin haunted me. I found myself looking at women who resembled her superficially, wondering what it would be like to be her partner, before recoiling back into my normal self.

By the time we returned to England, I was being torn in two. Alex had sent me several emails, strictly professional, so I knew that she would be defending her thesis in Manchester in the first week of September. I also knew she had applied for several overseas jobs, as had I. Since June she had not mentioned the idea of applying as a team. I was itching in my skin, longing for escape from the family home, from Marcus and my wifely responsibilities, and I was missing Alex. I finally admitted this to myself. So when I received this message from her, I knew already what my response would be.

_Hey Bern,_

_Don’t know if you’ve given any further thought to teaming up -professionally I mean. My supervisor at Manchester has just given me a brilliant reference for a job with the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan. The thing is- they want a methodologist as well as an evaluation specialist. The project is capacity building in resource-poor environments. Interested?_

_Al_


End file.
